Mathematics for Engineers, by Raymond W Dull, is still, 79 years after its first appearance, pure Dull. It is a very personal book. Dull confides, in the preface to the first edition, that "it was not his original intention to publish". Yes, he does refer to himself in the third person. And yes, he did succumb to the entreaties of others. He did it time and again: revised editions burst forth in 1941 and 1951.

In 780 pages, Dull covers the essentials, without fluff. Despite its simple format - just clean, clear prose and simple graphs and equations - Mathematics for Engineers is more than nail-biting. My copy, bought from a used bookstore, has a bite taken out of pages 367-370. The section on page 367, which is labelled "Damped Os", seems to have driven someone past the limits of endurance. Simple detective work suggests that the page originally (though it now seems, somewhat ironically) said "Damped Oscillations". The bite also removed an entire graph on page 368, leaving only the caption "Fig 287a". A larger graph on page 370 is still partly intact, the bite having sliced neatly through a line labelled "Axis of Rotation".

The most moving passages are in chapters 50 through 53, portions of which, Dull cautions, "should never be forgotten". I will not spoil the surprise, if that is the word, by recounting any details here.

The author never resorts to cheap thrills. Undaunted by the likelihood of ridicule ("A man named Dull writing about mathematics for engineers! Ha, ha, ha!," you can imagine him imagining people scoff), he maintains a writing style that is consistently dull. The complete absence of distractions will be welcomed by some readers.

Raymond W Dull revelled, albeit quietly, in his problems. He had clock problems, profit problems, time problems and work problems. All of these he describes with a minimum of adjectives, despite whatever emotion he may have felt, putting pen to paper.

Surprisingly, perhaps, beneath it all Dull is devoted to art. He waxes, by his standards, lyrical about shapes. Circles. Cones. Cylinders. Ellipses, ellipsoids, parabolas, parallelograms, prismoids, rhombuses. Trapezoids. Triangles. Wedges. He could go on and on. He does go on and on, with harmony and hyperbolas and even hyperboloids.

Dull's sense of humour is subtle. I will not go into it here.

Some may find the title Mathematics for Engineers off-putting. This is a shame, because the book is all about relationships - which are popular these days - and Dull's relationships, being mathematical, are utterly universal.

This splendid Dull book, whether taken all-in-a-gulp or in small bites, can help anyone understand the world at least a little better.

· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research (www.improbable.com), and organiser of the Ig Nobel Prize